The teachings of U.S. Pat. No. 9,092,898 titled “Method, System And Apparatus For The Augmentation Of Radio Emissions”, U.S. Pat. No. 8,880,101 titled “Method and apparatus for managing attributes and functionalities of predetermined geographical areas”, U.S. Pat. No. 9,264,874 titled “Method And Apparatus For Location Based Networking Sessions”, U.S. Pat. No. 9,286,610 titled “Method and apparatus for a principal/agent based mobile commerce”, all having the same inventor as the present patent application, are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
The teachings of Pat. App. U.S. 20160005233 A1 titled “Method, System, And Apparatus For Optimizing The Augmentation Of Radio Emissions”, U.S. 20150065176 A1 titled “Method and Apparatus for Managing Attributes and Functionalities of areas Exhibiting Density of Users”, Pat. App. U.S. 20150094097 A1 titled “Method, System And Apparatus For Location-based Machine-assisted Interactions”, Pat. App. U.S. 20150199547 A1 titled “Method, System and Apparatus for Adapting the Functionalities of a Connected Object Associated with a User ID”, Pat. App. U.S. 20140074874 A1 titled “Method, System And Apparatus For Location-based Machine-Assisted Interactions” all having the same inventor as the present patent application, are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
The teachings of U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,819,919, 6,542,750, 7,813,741, 6,542,748, 6,539,232, 6,542,749, 8,150,439 and 6,549,768 are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
The teachings of “GroupUs: Smartphone Proximity Data and Human Interaction Type Mining” (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ISWC. 2011.28) are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Furthermore, where a definition or use of a term in a document, which is incorporated by reference, is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geofence can be generated as in a radius around a point location such as a bar or a restaurant. A geofence can be a predefined set of boundaries connecting points expressed by latitude and longitude. Geofencing has been made possible especially by the introduction of GPS (Global Positioning System) technology and the miniaturization of electronic components that have made the locationing functionality a standard feature in Mobile Phones and portable electronics in general (User Equipment or UE). Geofencing can be implemented via many other localization techniques, both indoor and outdoor.
In this application the term ‘geofencing’ or “geofence” is not limited to virtual fences provided by storing one or more geographical locations and parameters that can be retrieved and then compared to actual locations obtained by using GPS positioning, but shall include all the possible techniques that may serve the purpose of defining a geographical area by using digital or electronic means, such as for example the radio horizon that defines the range of a radio carrier such as, e.g., 3G, 4G, WLAN, Bluetooth and RF-ID around a fixed or mobile point. Some of these techniques are discussed in detail in the patents and applications incorporated by reference, in particular U.S. Pat. No. 9,264,874, U.S. 20150065176, U.S. 20150094097 and U.S. 20140074874.
Geofencing technology can trigger or inhibit functionalities of location aware apparatuses. For example, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,813,741 titled “System and Method for Initiating Responses to Location-Based Events” a system may provide a response to one or more location-based services applications to provide location-based services, such as email, instant messaging, paging and the like.
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such as individuals or organizations) and the ties between these actors. One of the means by which these actors can communicate nowadays is the Internet and there are many websites providing a common platform where these actors can interact. A social network provides a way of analyzing the structures of social entities.
LinkedIn, for example, is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. It is mainly used for professional networking. LinkedIn is just one of the many different social networks. Many other social networks exist and they are targeting different facets of human desire for interaction. Some popular social networks are Badoo, Facebook, Foursquare, Friendster, Google+, Myspace, Habbo, Flixter, Flickr, Douban, Myheritage, Meetup and Classmates.com. Some of these social networks have “group forming” capability among its members.
Augmented reality is the integration of digital information with the user's environment in real time. Unlike virtual reality, which creates an artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it. Today, Google glass, heads-up displays in car windshields and Microsoft Hololenses are perhaps the most well known consumer AR products. This technology is used in many industries including healthcare, public safety, gas and oil, tourism and marketing.
Augmented reality apps are sometimes written in special 3D programs that allow the developer to tie animation or contextual digital information in the computer program to an augmented reality “marker” in the real world. When a computing device's AR app or browser plug-in receives digital information from a known marker, it begins to execute the marker's code and layer the corresponding image or images.
A radio direction finder (RDF) is a device for finding the direction, or bearing, to a radio source. The act of measuring the direction is known as radio direction finding or sometimes simply direction finding (DF). Using two or more measurements from different locations, the location of an unknown transmitter can be determined; alternately, using two or more measurements of known transmitters, the location of a vehicle can be determined. RDF is widely used as a radio navigation system, especially with boats and aircraft.
RDF systems can be used with any radio source, although the size of the receiver antennas are a function of the wavelength of the signal; very long wavelengths (low frequencies) require very large antennas, and are generally used only on ground-based systems. These wavelengths are nevertheless very useful for marine navigation as they can travel very long distances and “over the horizon”, which is valuable for ships when the line-of-sight may be only a few tens of miles. For aerial use, where the horizon may extend to hundreds of miles, higher frequencies can be used, allowing the use of much smaller antennas.
A direction finding techniques related to wearable equipment are described in App. U.S. 20160005233 and patent U.S. Pat. No. 9,092,898 by the same inventor as the present application. They are incorporated by reference. The techniques described, in some implementations, use antennas having asymmetric patterns. The paper “Design of U-Shape Microstrip Patch Antenna for Bluetooth Application at 2.4 GHz” published on the International Journal of Innovation and Scientific Research, ISSN 2351-8014 Vol. 6 No. 1 Aug. 2014, at pp. 92-96 describes one of these antennas with asymmetric radiation pattern. It is herein incorporated by reference.
An indoor positioning system (IPS) is a system to locate objects or people inside a building using radio waves, magnetic fields, acoustic signals, or other sensory information collected by mobile devices. There are several commercial systems on the market, but there is no standard for an IPS system.
IPS systems nowadays use different technologies, including distance measurement to nearby anchor nodes (nodes with known positions, e.g., WiFi access points), magnetic positioning, dead reckoning. They either actively locate mobile devices and tags or provide ambient location or environmental context for devices to be sensed. The localized nature of an IPS has resulted in design fragmentation, with systems making use of various optical, radio, or even acoustic technologies.
System designs usually take into account that at least three independent measurements are needed to find a location (e.g. trilateration). To compensate for stochastic errors there is usually a method for reducing the error budget significantly. The system might include information from other systems to cope for physical ambiguity and to enable error compensation.